The Video Game Revue

Final Fantasy XII

I'm about 12 hours into Final Fantasy XII and it is spectacular. In my experience, RPGs should be judged foremost on the basis of what they offer in terms of character & story, exploration, and the combat system. FF XII does very well in all of these departments. The marvellous artwork is also nice to have, of course, but it really only serves as the icing on top of what is a solid game all-round.

The most controversial aspect of FF XII by far is the new combat system in which there are no longer separate enemy encounters that the game cuts away to; instead enemies appear right in the environment and your characters engage in combat without a hard transition from the exploration aspect of the game. Everyone who has read anything about FF XII already knows this--in fact, it seems to be all that anybody ever talks about when speaking of FF XII--and I've heard a variety of opinions on the matter. Two of the more extreme opinions seem to be relatively common:

a) If you turn off the "gambits" then the combat system really isn't all that different from previous FF games, so FF XII isn't as big of a departure as everyone seems to think.

b) FF XII completely abandons a huge portion of what makes Final Fantasy games truely Final Fantasy games with this latest change, effectively ruining FF XII for hardcore fans.

Honestly, I think that both of these positions are wrong, although they're not easy to entirely disprove. To proponents of position (a), I say that first off, almost nobody is going to play FF XII without the gambits--they are one of the game's chief features and an integral part of the battle system. One certainly can play through FF XII without using gambits, but one is not meant to, which is to say that FF XII was designed around the assumption that players would be using gambits.

But more importantly, with this latest development in the Final Fantasy battle system, a degree of control is necessarily lost. Combat in FF XII frequently gets so disorganized and sudden that, as a player, I struggle to tell exactly what is happening. Which of my party members is hitting for the most damage, and which for the least? Which enemies are the toughest? Even keeping track of something as simple as who is targetting whom becomes a challenge, even with the aid of those red and blue graphical arcs. I get into situations in FF XII where a character in my party gets KOed, and not only did I not see it coming, but I'm not even sure which enemy dealt the final blow. This is the sort of chaos that one expects in World of WarCraft, where things happen rapidly and trying to stay on top of them is part of the challenge of the game. But this is not the sort of thing that one expects from a Final Fantasy game. Every other game from the core Final Fantasy series (except for FF XI, which doesn't count) makes it very easy to tell when a character is attacking or being attacked and exactly how much damage is being done, and the information flows at a deliberately easy to track pace.

So as much as I would like to believe that by some technicality, FF XII is in fact identical to other FF battle systems except for being "in the 3-D plane," or whatever you choose to call it, the plain truth of the matter is that the FF XII battle system does break away from an aspect of the flow and feel of FF combat that no other game in the core FF series (again, FF XI is excluded) has tampered with before. One of the things that makes an FF game a true Final Fantasy title is having set-piece style combat, and FF XII has replaced that with an open melee sort of experience.

But whereas position (a) makes too little of the significance of the changes to the combat system in FF XII, position (b) makes too much of it. I am not denying that some part of what many Final Fantasy fans would say made Final Fantasy games truly "Final Fantasy" games has been lost in this latest release, but that is also the case with pretty much every Final Fantasy game. One's opinion on the Final Fantasy series as a whole very much rests on where one entered the series, and to complain about change is unbecoming of a real FF fan.

In my mind, there is only one "pure" Final Fantasy game, and that is FF IV. It was the first to employ Active Time Battle, which has been the mainstay of the series. It had archetypical characters and a dramatic, but meandering storyline that is very typical of the series taken as a whole. But far more than that, FF IV just had the perfect feel of a Final Fantasy game world. It was neither too dark, nor too cheery. It had politics without being too political. There was a sense that the world of FF IV was well inhabited yet untamed--that civilizations were thriving, but that much of the world was wild and dangerous. And perhaps most importantly, there was the sense in FF IV that the actions of one enterprising individual could alter the state of the entire world, for better or for worse. These are themes that occur again and again throughout Final Fantasy, and--probably because of where I entered into the Final Fantasy experience--Final Fantasy IV seems to me to be the most overtly "Final Fantasy" flavoured expression of them.

Relative to FF IV, I could accuse every other Final Fantasy game that I've ever played as having strayed too far from the formula of what makes a game truly "Final Fantasy." Even in terms of the combat system, there have been large departures from what an FF IV player would expect to see all along. So while it is true that FF XII is a more radical break in terms of the combat system than we've seen before, it's not true that the precedent for change had not already been set. Final Fantasy is not a traditionalist's sort of gaming experience; it is constantly seeking to reinvent itself. If you're heart-broken because Final Fantasy XII is too different from how FF X was, then get over it. I had to do so, back when FF VII came out.

Bluntly put, Final Fantasy XII still offers what Final Fantasy is all about. Things are, as always, quite different this time around, but while FF XII does leave part of what FF fans have come to expect behind, it doesn't leave out those things that make a Final Fantasy game a true "Final Fantasy" game. I do appreciate that it is something of a shame that Final Fantasy XII doesn't have the separate combat engine--that classic "cut away to the battle" convention that RPG fans adore so much--and I think it's important for Square-Enix to get the message that RPG fans still want to see that, especially from Final Fantasy. But that doesn't change the fact that Final Fantasy XII is an awesome game, and an awesome Final Fantasy game at that.

One of the great things about being a traditionalist about Final Fantasy is that there's nothing to stop you from going back and replaying the old 16-bit and 32-bit Final Fantasy games; there's a decade's worth of content back there to enjoy, and it's very rare to meet a fan who has played and replayed them all. As for Final Fantasy XII, I would say to the hardcore fans to pull themselves together and get lost in the fantastic game that is there instead of pouting over what could have been. As I said several paragraphs ago, complaining about change is unbecoming of a true Final Fantasy fan.

posted by Parappa @ 10:20 AM